"You'll do," said the Colonel, and the medical orderly busily marked down two ciphers on Christian's card. "Excellent. It doesn't look so good to the eye, but you can march fifty kilometres a day and never feel it. Eh?"
"I did not say anything, Colonel," said Christian.
"Full field duty," the Colonel said, peering harshly at Christian, as though Christian had contradicted him. "Eh?"
"Yes, Sir," said Christian.
The Colonel tapped the leg impatiently. "Roll down your trousers, Sergeant," he said. He watched Christian stand up and push his trouser leg down into place. "What was your profession, Sergeant, before the war?"
"I was a skiing instructor, Sir."
"Eh?" The Colonel glared at Christian as though he had just insulted him. "What was that?"
"Skiing, Sir."
"Eh," said the Colonel flatly. "You will not ski with that knee any more. It is for children anyway." He turned away from Christian and washed his hands, with meticulous thoroughness, as though Christian's bare pale flesh had been unutterably filthy.
"Also, from time to time, you will find yourself limping. Eh, why not? Why shouldn't a man limp?" He laughed, showing yellow false teeth. "How will people know you have been in the war otherwise?"
He scrubbed busily at his hands in the large enamel sink that smelled so strongly of disinfectant as Christian went out of the room.
"You will kindly get me a bayonet," Hardenburg said. Christian was sitting at his side, looking at his leg, stretched, still stiff and dubious, out in front of him. In the next bed the Burn lay, lost as always in his silent Antarctic of bandage and his tropical and horrible smell. Christian had just told Hardenburg that he was leaving the next day for the front. Hardenburg had said nothing, but had merely lain still and rigid, his smooth, swathed head like a frightening and morbid egg on the pillow. Christian had waited for a moment and then had decided that Hardenburg had not heard him.
"I said, Lieutenant," he repeated, "that I was leaving tomorrow."
"I heard you," Hardenburg said. "You will kindly get me a bayonet."
"What was that, Sir?" Christian asked, thinking: It only sounds like bayonet because of the bandages.
"I said I want a bayonet, Bring it to me tomorrow."
"I am leaving at two o'clock in the afternoon," Christian said.
"Bring it in the morning."
Christian looked at the overlapping, thin lines where the bandage crossed over itself on the round, smooth surface, but there was no expression there, of course, to give him a clue to what Hardenburg was thinking, and as usual, nothing was to be learned from the everlasting, even tone of the hidden voice. "I don't have a bayonet, Sir," he said.
"Steal one tonight. There is no complication there. You can steal one, can't you?"
"Yes, Sir."
"I don't want the scabbard. Just bring me the knife."
"Lieutenant," said Christian, "I am very grateful to you and I would like to be of service to you in every way I can, but if you are going to…" He hesitated. "If you are going to kill yourself, I cannot bring myself to…"
"I am not going to kill myself," the even, muffled voice said.
"What a fool you are. You've listened to me for nearly two months now. Do I sound like a man who is going to kill himself?"
"No, Sir, but…"
"It's for him," Hardenburg said.
Christian straightened in the small, armless wooden chair.
"What's that, Sir?"
"For him, for him," Hardenburg said impatiently. "The man in the other bed."
Christian turned slowly and looked at the Burn. The Burn lay quiet, motionless, communicating nothing, as he had lain for two months. Christian turned back to the equal clot of bandage behind which lay the Lieutenant. "I don't understand, Sir," he said.
"He asked me to kill him," Hardenburg said. "It's very simple. He hasn't any hands left. Or anything left. And he wishes to die. He asked the doctor three weeks ago and the idiot told him to stop talking like that."
"I didn't know he could speak," Christian said dazedly. He looked at the Burn again, as though this newly discovered accomplishment must now somehow be apparent in the frightful bed.
"He can speak," Hardenburg said. "We have long conversations at night. He talks at night."
What discussions, Christian thought, must have chilled the Italian night air in this room, between the man who had no hands and no anything else left and the man without a face. He shivered. The Burn lay still, the covers shrouded over the frail frame. He hears now, Christian thought, staring at him, he understands every word we are saying.
"He was a watchmaker, in Nuremberg," Hardenburg said.
"He specialized in sporting watches. He has three children and he has decided he wants to die. Will you kindly bring the bayonet?"
"Even if I bring it," Christian said, fighting to preserve himself from the bitter complicity of this eyeless, voiceless, fingerless, faceless suicide, "what good will it do? He couldn't use it anyway."
"I will use it," said Hardenburg. "Is that simple enough for you?"
"How will you use it?"
"I will get out of bed and go over to him and use it. Now will you bring it?"
"I didn't know you could walk…" Christian said dazedly. In three months, the nurse had told him, Hardenburg might expect to take his first steps.
With a slow, deliberate motion, Hardenburg threw back the bed-clothes from his chest. As Christian watched him rigidly, as he might watch a corpse that had just risen in its grave and stepped out, Hardenburg pushed his legs in a wooden, mechanical gesture, over the side of the bed. Then he stood. He was dressed in baggy, stained flannel pyjamas. His bare feet were pallid and splotched on the marble floor of the Lyons silk manufacturer.
"Where is the other bed?" Hardenburg asked. "Show me the other bed."
Christian took his arm delicately and led him across the narrow space until Hardenburg's knees touched the other mattress. "There," Hardenburg said flatly.
"Why?" Christian asked, feeling as though he were putting questions to ghosts fleeing past a window in a dream. "Why didn't you tell anybody you could walk?"
Standing there, wavering a little in the yellowing flannel, Hardenburg chuckled behind his casque of bandage. "It is always necessary," he said, "to keep a certain amount of crucial information about yourself from the authorities who control you." He leaned over and felt lightly around on the blanket covering the chest of the Burn. Then his hand stopped. "There," a voice said from behind the ice drift of bandage above the counterpane. The voice was hoarse and lacking in human timbre. It was as though a dying bird, a panther drowning slowly in its own blood, an ape crucified on a sharp branch in a storm in the jungle, had at last accomplished speech with one final word.
"There."
Hardenburg's hand stopped, pale yellow and bony, like a weathered and ancient X-ray of a hand on the white counterpane.
"Where is it?" he asked harshly. "Where is my hand, Diestl?"
"On his chest," Christian whispered, staring fixedly at the ivory, spread fingers.
"On his heart," Hardenburg said. "Just above his heart. We have practised this every night for two weeks." He turned, with blind certainty, and crossed to his bed and climbed into it. He pulled the sheet up to where the helmet of bandage, like archaic armour, rose from his shoulders. "Now bring the bayonet. Don't worry about yourself. I will hide it for two days after you have gone, so that nobody can accuse you of the killing. And I will do it at night, when no one comes into the room for eight hours. And he will keep quiet." Hardenburg chuckled. "The watchmaker is very good at keeping quiet."